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The days leading up to the end of September were filled with a mad frenzy of fundraising emails from the federal opposition parties.

“I think he’s threatening to kill my dog,” a friend of mine commented on top of an email he was forwarding from chief Liberal party fundraiser Stephen Bronfman.

Sure enough, Bronfman’s emails were frequent, pointed and persistent. He started by telling Liberals they had only days to raise $300,000. When they reached that target, Bronfman said the goalposts had moved — to $500,000 by Sept. 30.

“I’m about to phone Justin,” read the subject line in one of the final emails from Bronfman, as he evoked the prospect of a very disappointed Liberal leader, Justin Trudeau.

“What can I tell Justin? Will you help me close this deal?”

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New Democrats were also flooding inboxes with appeals, similar in tone and tenor.

We won’t know for a month or two how well these opposition parties fared in their latest fundraising frenzy for the third quarter of 2013.

We can already see that both parties seem to have been doing their homework in modern methods of persuasion — especially some of the lessons that U.S. political organizers have been learning in recent years.

Both parties, notably, were sending out personalized information in their emails, reminding people what they had — and had not — donated so far this year.

“Thousands of Canadians have already chipped in what they can this week,” the NDP’s fundraising director, Heather Wilson, wrote to prospective supporters last weekend. “According to our records associated with this exact email address, you’re not yet one of them.”

Bronfman, meanwhile, said in one of his many emails: “When I’m making tough business decisions, I need real-time data at my fingertips . . . That’s why Justin sent you your donor history associated with this email address.”

It may be a business method, as Bronfman says, but it also fits with the success of what they’re calling “shame-based” campaigning south of the border.

U.S. political author Sasha Issenberg has been writing and talking about this technique since he started researching The Victory Lab, his 2012 book on the sophisticated machinery behind U.S. election campaigns.

For all the bells and whistles and the “big-data” revolution in U.S. politicking, Issenberg says, political success is still built on some old-fashioned ingredients — things like face-to-face contact and worrying about what your neighbours/colleagues/friends think.

For instance, as Issenberg recounts, some U.S. political scientists found they could radically improve voter turnout simply by mailing people a copy of their voting records and those of their neighbours.

Here’s how Issenberg put it, in a 2012 article in The Atlantic magazine:

“The most effective tool for turning non-voters into voters . . . is a threat to send neighbours evidence of one’s apathy . . . By introducing shame into the calculus of citizenship, the researchers behind these tests increased the psychological cost of not voting. In so doing, they restored the sense — sadly lost for a century — that voting ought to be not a personal act but a social one.”

The heartening conclusion of this research is that politics doesn’t need to be totally transactional; politicians selling and voters buying. It’s still founded on relationships.

Issenberg, who has paid a couple of calls on Canada since The Victory Lab came out, has reminded his audiences that while the marketing pros were indeed helpful to the political class in the past decade, it’s the social scientists — the behaviour experts — who really got results.

So far, there’s no sign that either Liberals or New Democrats are going to send people the donor records of their neighbours.

A resourceful person could find that out, since Elections Canada does post the names, addresses and amounts of money contributed by individuals to political parties.

In contrast, Elections Canada does not keep track of whether people voted or stayed away from the polls in past campaigns. Given that this information has proven useful in motivating voters in the U.S. — where turnout has been climbing over the past decade — is that perhaps a record we should be keeping?

Nonetheless, we are seeing some social science at work in these emails the Liberals and NDP have been churning out over the past couple of weeks. They tell the prospective donor: you’re part of the team, the team notices you and is keeping track.

Will it work? The third-quarter numbers may tell the tale.

Will it get more intense leading up to the 2015 election? Let’s just say it’s probably not a good idea to give any political party the names of your pets.

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